Ahmadinejad finds reaction to remarks 'positive'

3 January 2006, TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considers the reaction so far to his Holocaust remarks as "positive", state news agency IRNA reported Tuesday.

3 January 2006

TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considers the reaction so far to his Holocaust remarks as "positive", state news agency IRNA reported Tuesday.

IRNA quoted member of parliament Falahat Pisheh as saying that Ahmadinejad told members of the national security council of the parliament that "the Islamic world was getting passive and extinguished (on opposing Israel) and needed a shock on the basis of truth".

In a series of remarks starting last October, Ahmadinejad has several times doubted the extent of the Holocaust - at one point calling it a "fairy tale" - and said that if Europeans were responsible for the Jews' massacre, then they should relocate the Israeli state to their continent.

Ahmadinejad said last week that "Zionism is de facto neo-fascism" adding that the crimes committed by "Zionists" against the Palestinians were the same as the crimes committed by the Nazis in the Second World War.

The ultra-conservative president termed creation of the "Zionist system" in the Middle East not only as the "ethnic and religious cleansing" of Jews from Europe but also as an effort to undermine Islam and Muslims through the Israeli state.

IRNA further quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that world Muslims regarded Iran as "watchtower of Islam and centre for revival of the Islamic identity".

The state television has started programmes in support of Ahmadinejad's doubts on the extent of the Holocaust in which Iranian and Arabic experts evaluate what they call the "real dimensions" of the massacre.

By historical accounts, the Holocaust involved the mass systematic annihilation of some six million Jews during Nazi Germany's occupation of much of Europe during World War Two.